Being in college for about a month and half now, I have been able to understand what the difference between an adhoc programmer and a programmer who thinks is. I've also understood some parts of where to focus on when you're actually making a usable application, if you think that the application will come under heavy use by a lot of different people! I know I have made quite a few posts on how the design and the visual aspect of your blog should be appealing and good, but here, I'm going to slightly deviate from my preaching, and going to stick with giving my opinion only till the blog aspect, as I believe that people will want information only till where it helps their blog! :)

When people set out to make their blog, it's easy to go for the visual styles and make it one of the the most attractive (visually) blogs around. However, there are too many blogs that I've seen which lack from a proper base from the functional point of view. There will be times when a simple thing such as a search for posts will be missing. Thankfully, the sudden focus on categories and tags pushed people to implement them for their own blogs, otherwise for a good amount of time, I had seen good blogs lacking this basic organising feature. And these are the kind of things that actually make a blog particularly usable. A site which lacks visual appeal but makes up for it by offering myriad traversing and searching features, will (in my opinion) attract more viewers than a non-functional but good looking site.

There are quite a few hacks which work towards strengthening the above mentioned things on your blog. I can try and list out the few must haves that I think you should include in your code:

• Author Comment Highlighting - goes one up on my hack
• Native Blog Search - is what put me on the bloggerhacking map! :P
• Aditya's/Asynchronous Blogger Categories Index - uses del.icio.us and some fancy pants javascript to categorise your blog

These are surely not all the ones you need, but I've been away for quite a while, hence don't know which are the ones that have come up newly. Feel free to refer me to the new hacks that have come up, and if I think they fit my definition of a back-end hack, I'll add it to that list! :)